For just an instant she did not move at all. “You never really expected nothing else, did you?” he said.
“No,” she said.
Then even that winter was over at last. It ended as it had begun, in rain, not cold rain but loud fierce gusts of warm water washing out of the earth the iron-enduring frost, the belated spring hard on its bright heels and all coming at once, pell-mell and disordered, fruit and bloom and leaf, pied meadow and blossoming wood and the long fields shearing dark out of winter’s slumber, to the shearing plough.
The school was already closed for the planting year when he passed it and drove up to the store and hitched his team to the old familiar post and mounted among the seven or eight men squatting and lounging about the gallery as if they had not moved since he had looked back last at them almost six months ago. “Well, men,” he said. “School’s already closed, I see. Chillen can go to the field now and give you folks a chance to rest.”
“It’s been closed since last October,” Quick said. “Teacher’s quit.”
“I. O.? Quit?”
“His wife come in one day. He looked up and saw her and lit out.”
“His what?” Ratliff said.
“His wife,” Tull said. “Or so she claimed. A kind of big grey-coloured women with a — —”
“Ah shucks,” Ratliff said. “He ain’t married. Ain’t he been here three years? You mean his mother.”
“No, no,” Tull said. “She was young all right. She just had a kind of grey colour all over. In a buggy. With a baby about six months old.”
“A baby?” Ratliff said. He looked from face to face among them, blinking. “Look here,” he said. “What’s all this anyway? How’d he get a wife, let alone a baby six months old? Ain’t he been right here three years? Hell a mile, he ain’t been out of hearing long enough to done that.”
“Wallstreet says they are his,” Tull said.
“Wallstreet?” Ratliff said. “Who’s Wallstreet?”
“That boy of Eck’s.”
“That boy about ten years old?” Ratliff blinked at Tull now. “They never had that panic until a year or two back. How’d a boy ten years old get to be named Wallstreet?”
“I don’t know,” Tull said.
“I reckon it’s his all right,” Quick said. “Leastways he taken one look at that buggy and he ain’t been seen since.”
“So now,” Ratliff said. “A baby is one thing in pants that will make any man run, provided he’s still got room enough to start in. Which it seems I. O. had.”
“He needed room,” Bookwright said in his harsh, abrupt voice. “This one could have held him, provided somebody just throwed I. O. down first and give it time to get a hold. It was bigger than he was already.”
“It might hold him yet,” Quick said.
“Yes,” Tull said. “She just stopped long enough to buy a can of sardines and crackers. Then she druv on down the road in the same direction somebody told her I. O. had been going. He was walking. Her and the baby both et the sardines.”
“Well, well,” Ratliff said. “Them Snopes. Well, well — —” He ceased. They watched quietly as the Varner surrey came up the road, going home. The negro was driving; in the back seat with her mother, Mrs. Flem Snopes sat. The beautiful face did not even turn as the surrey drew abreast of the store. It passed in profile, calm, oblivious, incurious. It was not a tragic face: it was just damned. The surrey went on.
“Is he really waiting in that jail yonder for Flem Snopes to come back and get him out?” the fourth man said.
“He’s still in jail,” Ratliff said.
“But is he waiting for Flem?” Quick said.
“No,” Ratliff said. “Because Flem ain’t coming back here until that trial is over and finished.” Then Mrs. Littlejohn stood on her veranda, ringing the dinner-bell, and they rose and began to disperse. Ratliff and Bookwright descended the steps together.
“Shucks,” Bookwright said. “Even Flem Snopes ain’t going to let his own blood cousin be hung just to save money.”
“I reckon Flem knows it ain’t going to go that far. Jack Houston was shot from in front, and everybody knows he never went anywhere without that pistol, and they found it laying there in the road where they found the marks where the horse had whirled and run, whether it had dropped out of his hand or fell out of his pocket when he fell or not.
I reckon Flem had done inquired into all that. And so he ain’t coming back until it’s all finished. He ain’t coming back here where Mink’s wife can worry him or folks can talk about him for leaving his cousin in jail. There’s some things even a Snopes won’t do. I don’t know just exactly what they are, but they’s some somewhere.”
Then Bookwright went on, and he untied the team and drove the buckboard on into Mrs. Littlejohn’s lot and unharnessed and carried the harness into the barn.
He had not seen it since that afternoon in September either, and something, he did not know what, impelled and moved him; he hung the gear up and went on through the dim high ammoniac tunnel, between the empty stalls, to the last one and looked into it and saw the thick, female, sitting buttocks, the shapeless figure quiet in the gloom, the blasted face turning and looking up at him, and for a fading instant there was something almost like recognition even if there could have been no remembering, in the devastated eyes, and the drooling mouth slacking and emitting a sound, hoarse, abject, not loud.
Upon the overalled knees Ratliff saw the battered wooden effigy of a cow such as children receive on Christmas.
He heard the hammer before he reached the shop. The hammer stopped, poised; the dull, open, healthy face looked up at him without either surprise or interrogation, almost without recognition. “Howdy, Eck,” Ratliff said. “Can you pull the old shoes off my team right after dinner and shoe them again? I got a trip to make tonight.”
“All right,” the other said. “Anytime you bring them in.”
“All right,” Ratliff said. “That boy of yours. You changed his name lately, ain’t you?” The other looked at him, the hammer poised. On the anvil the ruby tip of the iron he was shaping faded slowly. “Wallstreet.”
“Oh,” the other said. “No, sir. It wasn’t changed. He never had no name to speak of until last year. I left him with his grandma after my first wife died, while I was getting settled down; I was just sixteen then. She called him after his grandpa, but he never had no actual name. Then last year after I got settled down and sent for him, I thought maybe he better have a name. I. O. read about that one in the paper. He figured if we named him Wallstreet Panic it might make him get rich like the folks that run that Wallstreet panic.”
“Oh,” Ratliff said. “Sixteen. And one kid wasn’t enough to settle you down. How many did it take?”
“I got three.”
“Two more beside Wallstreet. What — —”
“Three more besides Wall,” the other said.
“Oh,” Ratliff said. The other waited a moment. Then he raised the hammer again. But he stopped it and stood looking at the cold iron on the anvil and laid the hammer down and turned back to the forge. “So you had to pay all that twenty dollars,” Ratliff said. The other looked back at him. “For that cow last summer.”
“Yes. And another two bits for that ere toy one.”
“You bought him that too?”
“Yes. I felt sorry for him. I thought maybe anytime he would happen to start thinking, that ere toy one would give him something to think about.”
BOOK FOUR. THE PEASANTS
CHAPTER ONE
1
A LITTLE WHILE before sundown the men lounging about the gallery of the store saw, coming up the road from the south, a covered wagon drawn by mules and followed by a considerable string of obviously alive objects which in the levelling sun resembled vari-sized and -coloured tatters torn at random from large billboards — circus posters, say — attached to the rear of the wagon and inherent with its own separate and collective motion, like the tail of a kite.
“What in the hell is that?” one said.
“It’s a circus,” Quick said. They began to rise, watching the wagon. Now they could see that the animals behind the wagon were horses. Two men rode in the wagon.
“Hell fire,” the first man — his name was Freeman — said. “It’s Flem Snopes.” They were all standing when the wagon came up and stopped and Snopes got down and approached the steps. He might have departed only this morning. He wore the same cloth cap, the minute bow-tie against the white shirt, the same grey trousers. He mounted the steps.
“Howdy, Flem,” Quick said. The other looked briefly at all of them and none of them, mounting the steps. “Starting you a circus?”
“Gentlemen,” he said. He crossed the gallery; they made way for him. Then they descended the steps and approached the wagon, at the tail of which the horses stood in a restive clump, larger than rabbits and gaudy as parrots and shackled to one another and to the wagon itself with sections of barbed wire.
Calico-coated, small-bodied, with delicate legs and pink faces in which their mismatched eyes rolled wild and subdued, they huddled, gaudy motionless and alert, wild as deer, deadly as rattlesnakes, quiet as doves. The men stood at a respectful distance, looking at them. At
